Perfsys

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am part of the engineering team for a startup engineering firm with a development presence in the UK providing a niche B2B software solution and we are building out web services to support licensing and provide customer management tools.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfsys?

We had developed a customer dashboard web app for our new business, which needed a deployment pipeline.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed someone to take on the responsibility of provisioning AWS resources, finishing up a CI /CD workflow, and clearly documenting the setup of web app while following current industry best practices.

How did you select Perfsys?

We approached a number of individuals and teams and interviewed a selection to identify someone that would be able to both meet the goals and fit in with our team generally.

After a couple of initial calls, we selected to work with Perfsys based on their approachability and domain experience.

Describe the project in detail.

Once we selected Perfsys, they were eager to engage and deep-dive on our needs as a startup.

We worked closely with a project owner to scope out the deliverables - with recommendations on technology and strategy - early on in the project, and milestones were rapidly marked off by both the project owner and his team.

What was the team composition?

Our main interactions were through a single point of contact, though there were named contributions from another developer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The project was completed easily within the expected time-frame, allowing our internal engineering resources to focus on core business decisions while the cloud deployment was taken care of by Perfsys.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was tightly integrated with how we like to operate. Everything was communicated through Slack, with regular updates. Code commits, and build status updates set up to automatically notify the engineering team of progress.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was very impressed with the communication and willingness to teach and transfer knowledge so that we were left in a great place to continue maintenance in the future.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None at all!

Please describe your company and your position there.

Ingmar Bornholz, my-vpa Gmbh, CEO and Co-founder of germanies largest provider of virtual assistant services.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfsys?

We've hired Perfsys team in 2017 to help us migrate our production environment to AWS, including CI/CD configurations, cluster monitoring. Setup and configure SSO solution based on Keycloak Identity provider. Later we asked Perfsys team to migrate Test environment to AWS as well Also Perfsys team did AWS Cloud solution for AWS Connect.

What were your goals for this project?

Migration to AWS cloud, setup Production and Staging environments. Get support through our journey as my-vpa business. Setup SSO for our applications like Webapp, Owncloud, AWS Connect

How did you select this vendor?

From Upwork and other references

Describe the project in detail.

Execute migration from private cloud to AWS. Deploy, setup and configure Kubernetes cluster on AWS. Setup monitoring and CI/CD pipelines. Maintain updates and deployments.

Architect and implement a custom SSO solution based on Keycloak that would federate users to our internet MySQL database. Help us on a daily basis with updates and mobile app development. Design and develop a system for Call Center in the Cloud, implement custom voice mail solution using AWS Connect.

What was the team composition?

1 Devops engineer, 1 Project Manager, 1 AWS Developer

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We have our web app running in AWS cloud available with a link https://http://app.my-vpa.com/. SSO solution is available with a link https://kc.my-vpa.com

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Having the same idea of how to approach projects in an agile way, the communication and workflow was outstanding from the beginning.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are proactive and have creative ideas on how to approach the very unique set we have in our company. Almost always finding professional thus effective solutions.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Would be good to move even closer together :)

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Founder and CEO of Audience Genomics... Moneyball for Content. We deliver data to support content creation and distribution decisions which, up until now, were made purely by gut. Our data is tailored to help storytellers to understand the interests, attributes and values their target audience responds to.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfsys?

We hired Perfsys to develop a complex Extract Transform and Load project

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to be able to dynamically assign descriptions, labels and categories to people places and things.

How did you select this vendor?

Perfsys came highly recommended by an existing client.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Perfsys built a serverless architecture system that allows us to quickly and cost-effectively search terabytes of data, find the relevant record, extract the relevant values from the record and append the information to our database. They also built a front end user permissioning system.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of two dedicated developers and the company's principal who provided hands-on strategic direction.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The work that Perfsys delivered replaces manually work that would have previously taken hundreds of man-hours. We now have a system that can scale and handle any demand in just minutes.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We worked in two week sprints, communicated multiple times a day over Slack and the team was available to join us for phone calls and/or videoconferencing with screen shares whenever it was needed. The project management was highly effective.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

What was most impressive was their strategic thinking. The team was far from one that just followed direction blindly. They truly took ownership over the project and they gave it the same level of thoughtfulness, care and attention to detail as if it were their own software.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There is very little I would recommend as areas for improvement.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of Intro, Inc.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfsys?

We hired Perfsys to create a serverless website and a CodePipeline for building and deploying sources. 

What were your goals for this project?

 The goal was a cloud-based website that met our requirements. 

How did you select this vendor?

We selected them based on recommendations from our partners.

Describe the project in detail.

They built the website using AWS S3 and AWS CloudFront. The project also required experience in Python, API Gateway, and AWS Lambda. 

What was the team composition?

They provided one full-time Python developer, one full-time Javascript frontend developer, and one development operations manager. 

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

I trust them. I can go to bed at night and know that I will not wake up in the morning to a user complaint about website or login errors, something I experienced on a weekly basis with my previous agency. I have a very high level of confidence with Perfsys. Their maintenance package includes built-in alerts, none of which have been triggered yet. If something were to go wrong on the Perfsys side, I am confident they will know about it and resolve it before I hear of it from a user. 

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their development workflow was based on the Agile/SCRUM approach. We had daily sync calls as well as weekly planning meetings.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Although we may suggest an idea, they will always keep us straight on industry best practices. The maintenance package I pay now is less than the retainer I for the previous agency, who regularly complained that the retainer was not enough to cover the number of hours they worked each month.  

Are there any areas for improvement?

They need to be more proactive in creating bespoke elements on the website and in suggesting better enhancements.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the CTO of a company that was building applications focused on healthcare integration.

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfsys?

We hired them for full-stack application development.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to develop a scalable and configurable product that could be deployed to a customer site or hosted in our datacenter.

How did you select this vendor?

We used an internal rating process in which we choose three vendors and have a formula with which we weigh their strengths and weaknesses. We do this in numerous ways, but mainly through interviews and open-source research.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

Perfsys provided full-stack development using technologies such as Node.js, Docker, NoSQL, Hadoop, and Ext JS.

What was the team composition?

The team scaled from three to five people depending on the amount of work for a specific time frame. They also provided development and architecture support.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We successfully built and deployed the product to production environments, and were able to gain business from the scalability and ease of configuration that the solution offers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project was managed by an internal project manager. We used Google Hangouts, Mind Maps, and internal sprint management tools.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to meet a deadline and implement complex solutions with little rework is remarkable.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

None that I can remember.